The Wales-Wide Web

Blogs should have a significant starting point. Mike Malloch from Knownet set me up this blog over a week ago. And I have spent a week trying to think of something significant to start with. What could be better than Werder Bremen going into the winter break top of the Bundesliga.

Let me explain a little. It is not just that I live in Bremen and support the local club. But it is that despite big business taking over sport (like everything else) and turning it into a commodity to be bought and sold, small community clubs like Werder still turn over the big business backed teams. Compared to Schalke, Dortmund or Leverkusen - let alone Bayern Munchen - Werder have little money. But they have still been consistently the best team of the season.

And that is what makes a sport like football still exciting. Once money rules there is no reason to follow a club any more.Just for the record Werder overcame a nervous start last night to win 3-0 against Rostock. Interestingly, for the top team, this was Werders first match they did not concede a goal.

Long may Werder stay top. I shall keep you in touch.

It is pretty clear e-learning is not working. Despite all the hype learners just are not being turned on by it. That is not to say that there is not a lot of e-learning going on and some very fine learning software and content has been developed. But e-learning is not transforming the learning landscape in the way it was supposed to.

There is plenty of debate as to why. Most often cited are the lack of training of teachers in facilitating e-learning, the need for new pedagogic approaches and a lack of quality learning materials.

I think it goes deeper than this. If there is to be an expansion of e-learning it will be predominantly in what is known as the lifelong learning sector. This means involving adults in on-going learning. This in turn means pursauding enterprises to support e-learning. Whilst large companies are generally developing and implementing training plans and programmes - and many of them have embraced e-learning - in small and medium enterprises, which employ the majority of people, there is no culture of training and learning. Without such a culture e-learning has little chance.

The second problem, which may be more fundamental, involves the nature of knowledge. Much learning happens through the aquisition and practice of tacit knowledge - defined by Polyani as knowledge we do not know we have. This knowledge is acquired informally - through social interaction or through practice. Of course it can be said that traditional classroom learning and training also neglects tacit knowledge. But I think we have underestimated the hidden curricla processees that take place in formal learning and training contexts through social interaction between indivudals during the formal learning. Thus, very often, both explcit and tacit knowledge are acquired side by side - and may interact.

The problem with e-learning is it isolates the learner from a social context. Even well designed constructivist learning using group exercises fails to support tacit knowledge acquisition. This is not to say it is impossible for e-learning to support the acquistion of tacit knowledge. Knownet is working on two projects - one for careers guidance professionals and one for school students - which do focus on shared knowledge (more about these in the next few days). However we do need a very thorough rethink of the interface between knowledge and learning and what role technology might play in such an interface.

A short entry this time because its eight o'clock on a Friday and I'm the only one left in the office. Still, my hangover from yesterday's office Christmas party has subsided enough for me to write this post.

I spent an hour this afteroon messing around with a video chat application that our friend Ray, from Raycom in the Netherlands, has set up.

The background is that for the new Special Interest Group on Open Source Software, which we are launching in the new year, we have said we want to try out video conferencing. We have looked a number of commercial applications for multi point video conferencing and concluded that they were not always well designed - too much clutter - overpriced and that there were a lot of issues with firewalls. Ray has set up a demo using a Flash MX server and it works pretty sweetly. We will probably go with this.

I have been using iChat on my Mac for point-to-point communication since the summer. A few quick conclusions. firstly it is workable - it is very, very easy to use. The only real problem is that the latency can be bad - especially so between my office in Bremen and the Knownet main office in Bangor. But the big discovery is that it does make a difference being able to see people and chat. We have not tried multi point communicatuion yet. If we can make it technically easy, it may be very useful. It may well be that the latency issue will not be so big in a larger group where you need to take turns anyway.

Video still has novelty value. One of the amusing things is everyone wants to come and watch and wave to people at the other end. It must have been like this when they first invented the telephone!

Especially in the context of European projects where we have partners working togther from eight or nine countries, it could revolutionise the way we work and hopefully cut down on travel. Firstly travel is time consuming, secondly it is very tiring and thirdly it causes an awful lot of pollution. It is not enviromentally sustainable to keep expanding air travel in the way we are.

OK - so I gues Apple's application is ahead of anything available for the PC as yet. But, generally, what Apple do one year the PC will do two years later. I think video conferecing could change many of the ways we work togther. More on the next few weeks. I will also post something on the use of text chat whcih I have been experimenting with.

OK - that is all for now. I am off for a pint and then an early night.

Back from a quick trip to Ireland, Wales and England. On the way back, just outside Hanover airport, someone managed to ram my taxi at about 120 kilometres an hour. I am fine but my poor Powerbook is seriously injured. Having been literally cut from the wreck it has only about half the screen pixels working and the case is bent and torn open. But it still works! Have got an external keyboard and screen until I can find someone to sell me a new one (Apple supply is as crazy as usual).

Anyway, the main point of this entry is a quick reflection on the technology kids were going for this Christmas. I spent Christmas day and Boxing day in Derby in England with my brother, his partner and their three children - all girls - aged 15, 12 and 10, and my parents.

Usual obscene orgy of conspicuous consumption. Why does the UK go in for such wild consumer excesses at Christmas?

The big Christmas success were vaious music machines. Chritmas day and boxing day me and the kids were queing up for use of the computers for sharing our music whilst the other grown ups looked on in bemusement.

But the other big hit was something called the Dance Mat - a foot driven inetrface for the play station - providing different levels of difficulty in dancing on eight different key pads in time with the music and the on-sceen instructions. All accompanyed by computer generated encouragement such as "You're looking good", "Keep it up" - or rising crescendos og booing when the footwork fell out of pace. A few things interested me here. First was the fascinations of the kids and their dogged detrmination to improve their skills and scores. Unfortunaely the youngest one decided to base her efforts on a Spice Girls song! Ther second wa sthat although an on-screen androgenous digitalised dancer seemd to dance to the music and provide guidance ot the steps, the reality was far from it. It was far more a exercise in aerobics than in dancing. And of course there was no creativity or room to make up your own inetrpretations of the music.

But, on the plus side, it showed the potential for completely different interfaces to a computer for learning. Why are we so tied to the keyboard as an input device? But also it points again to the games industry being far more imagoinitive in design than the education technology providers. Lets hope that is soon to change.

More on this later this week.